GOP picks principle over progress

Morrison won the 2006 election handily.  When he made his acceptance speech on election night, he drew great cheers in claiming his as "a victory for Kansans who want to make sure their most private personal records are kept private." Snoop Dog Kline had been effectively muzzled—or so the

moderate establishment presumed.

On December 11, 2006, much to the establishment’s professed horror, the largely conservative Republican precinct captains of Johnson County ignored the appeals of their moderate brethren and voted for the now widely scorned Kline to fill the remaining two years of Morrison’s term as district attorney.

“The Johnson County Republican Party just thumbed its nose at voters by installing outgoing Attorney General Phill Kline as the county’s new district attorney,” wailed The Wichita Eagle.

"Phill Kline and his supporters have shown a stunning disregard for voter sentiment in Johnson County. They have a lot of gall,” thundered The Kansas City Star.

When one editorial writer at the Star accurately attempted to explain how the precinct captains “put principle over politics” in choosing the badly scarred Kline, the Star’s editors changed the headline to the tellingly muddled, “GOP picks principle over progress.”

At year’s end, Star columnist Rhonda Chriss Lokeman summed up her paper’s Orwellian take on the issue at hand by awarding its fanciful 2006 “Kill and Be Killed Award” not to Tiller or Morrison, but to Kline.

“Theocrat Kline is obsessed with George Tiller, who performs abortions in Kansas,” Lokeman elaborated. Kline, of course, showed no inclination to theocracy, and to describe Tiller as “someone who performs abortions” was like describing Tiger Woods as “someone who plays golf.”  What made Lokeman’s indictment all the more worrisome was that she was married to the Star’s then editor and now publisher and president, Mark Zieman.

Morrison calls Tiller charges “ridiculous”

Despite the crushing indictment of the media, Kline refused to roll over.  Just before he left office as attorney general, after years of legal struggle, he had managed to secure the redacted records of abortion clinics in both Wichita and Johnson County.

While late-term abortion law demands that impairment to the mother be serious and irreversible, Kline saw that Tiller’s files were full of dubious diagnoses like “single episode, major depression” and “adjustment disorder” that seemed to be neither. He promptly filed 30 counts against Dr. George Tiller’s Wichita clinic for performing illegal late-term abortions.

With the media wind filling his sails, Tiller confidently appealed to his political allies.  One of them, Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston, found a friendly judge to dismiss the charges against Tiller on jurisdictional grounds.  The case was appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, but when Morrison settled in as attorney general, he asked that the appeal be dropped.   He did not meet much resistance.  In Kansas, it should be noted, all Supreme Court judges are appointed by the governor in a process that gives undue power to the state’s legal bar, a creature of the moderate establishment.

To be sure, Morrison promised to examine the Tiller medical records that Kline had successfully subpoenaed “inside out, backwards and forwards, and under a neutron microscope.” But no one, his friends included, much believed Morrison.

While Morrison was exploring a potential criminal investigation of Dr. Tiller, Governor Sebelius was honoring the good doctor and his staff at an elegant but extremely discreet soiree at Cedar Crest, the governor’s Mansion.  The party took place on April 9, 2007. 

Among the more revealing of the photos taken at the event is one of Governor Sebelius holding a T-Shirt presented to her by Tiller, which reads “Trifecta 2006: Sebelius, Parkinson, Morrison.” In the photo, Sebelius points at Tiller as if to acknowledge his contribution to that victory.

Tiller’s generosity was apparently not in vain.  A month later, in May 2007, Morrison leaked his exit strategy in the Tiller affair through an influential media supporter, Steve Rose of The Johnson County Sun.

In its casual acceptance of the unthinkable, the Rose column on the Sun front page calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil.”  Rose acknowledged Tiller’s boast that he had more experience in late abortion services than anyone in the Western Hemisphere.

Rose then assured the “confused” reader that Tiller did not practice partial birth abortions but rather the presumably more benign “late-term viable abortion.”  In this procedure, the good doctor solved the apparent viability problem, said Rose soothingly, by “taking apart the fetus inside the uterus and removing pieces through the dilated cervix.”

“Unless the Kansas Legislature changes its law,” Rose continued, “Dr. Tiller can continue that procedure every day of the week, as well as other late-term abortion techniques.”

Rose fully misunderstood the law, which was never the issue.  The issue was its enforcement. And this is where those pesky medical records came into play. Under Kansas law, as mentioned, the records have to show evidence that a woman carrying a viable unborn child could be saved from death or “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” only through abortion.

Rose claimed that Morrison had reviewed the subpoenaed files in question and found many of the charges “ridiculous.” That much said, Rose had “a strong hunch” that Morrison would file a few misdemeanor charges “pertaining to the lack of notification to the state,” suggest a modest fine, and call off Kline’s “witch hunt.”

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